Marcus Bean pulls no punches when he addresses the profound impact his move to Brentford had on his career.

“For sure, Brentford definitely saved my career and got my love for the game back,” he affirms in an exclusive chat with BEES.

“I wouldn’t say it’s too dramatic to say that because it really could have been the end of me. I like to think of myself as a strong character but before that, I was at a real low point.”

That low point? The midfielder’s ill-fated spell at Blackpool, in which he made just 23 appearances for the Seasiders over the course of three miserable seasons on the Lancashire coast. Simon Grayson snapped up Bean from boyhood club QPR in January 2006, deployed him on 17 occasions as he guided the relegation-threatened side to Championship safety and all looked rosy as the new season dawned three months later. The reality couldn’t have been much harsher.

He continues: “It started off great. At the time they were in relegation trouble; I came in with a few other signings and I felt that we made a really big impact. I was then offered another two-year contract and I would’ve thought I’d have at least been in the manager’s plans, playing regularly, but, for whatever reason, that didn’t happen.

“The next two years were just terrible and to be honest, I lost my love for the game. I said to myself that I needed to get back to London – Blackpool was four hours away from my family, I was on my own and I wouldn’t like to say I was depressed because I wasn’t diagnosed, but I guess it was the closest you could get to depression without being depressed.

“I think Blackpool was probably my worst time in football. I said to myself in the summer, when I was leaving Blackpool, that if I didn’t get a club in London or closer to my family, I could possibly call it a day, I was that fed up with football. Then obviously Brentford came in.”

Of course, we will revisit his Griffin Park further on but first of all, let’s rewind back to the start of Bean’s extensive professional career, which started back in 2002 with the Bees’ sworn enemies Queens Park Rangers.

The Rs’ academy is not particularly revered in the game and – prior to the breakout of current star Ebere Eze – had produced just three first team players in the last 15 years – Richard Langley, a certain Raheem Sterling and Marcus.

On a warm summer’s afternoon in August 2002, Rangers boss Ian Holloway handed him his debut in the second half of a fiery contest with Wycombe, but just eight minutes later he’d been dismissed.

Marcus admits he “thought that was the end of my career”, but a forgiving Holloway brushed off the misdemeanour. Though he would finish the season with just eight appearances, his talent had conjured an air of promise. In the face of financial turmoil, QPR were promoted from the second division in 2003/04, he was named as the club’s Young Player of the Year and a prominent role seemed a mere formality.

Yet disappointment beckoned and, after playing a bit-part role, he joined League Two Swansea on-loan.

“It was very frustrating,” he says. “I think the gaffer wanted to go forward with more experienced players in the higher league, though I felt I was ready to play.

“That friction ended up with me leaving the club, probably in hindsight prematurely because he didn’t want me to leave, but I felt that I was a young player making my way and that it would be best for my career to go away and try to play regularly somewhere else. I was still young and could’ve learned a lot by staying around, but I have no regrets in my playing career.”

There was a certain déjà vu surrounding the following season – a bit part role at Loftus Road, brightened by another loan at Swansea – who had been promoted to League One in 2005 – before the doomed move to Blackpool in January of 2006.

His hellish two years at Bloomfield Road need no re-introduction, but the stats that accompany it make it difficult not to empathise with the cult hero; from 22 August 2006 to 20 October 2007, Bean made just 24 appearances for both the Seasiders and loan employers Rotherham. By the time he made his Brentford debut on 9 August 2008, a 294-day spell without first team action had elapsed.

Therefore, it goes without saying that when news broke of Andy Scott’s interest, it heralded the start of a new beginning.

“My agent at the time said there was interest from Andy Scott and to be honest, I didn’t even think twice. I was buzzing and they could’ve handed me anything and I would’ve signed it at the time.

“I snapped their hands off because I was back in west London, I was home. Anyone who’s played football will tell you that your best performances come when you are settled in your home life and happy. I was so happy to be back.”

Early performances garnered little attention, and Bean – who was sent off on just his second appearance against Swansea in the Carling Cup – became aware of the elephant in the room – his past spell with arch-rivals QPR.

“I wouldn’t say there was animosity but I felt in my head that I had to play twice as well to get recognition, or that’s how it felt,” he explains. “I didn’t really get much recognition early on, which was to be expected as I’ve experienced the same at other clubs having played for their rivals. You have to win fans over anyway but I think I had to work extra hard at Brentford because there is bad blood between the two clubs. That was another one of my proud moments, the fact that I managed to come over to Brentford and in the end, I’d like the think the fans appreciated me.”

The central midfield partnership between Bean and Kevin O’Connor grew stronger with each passing week and it soon became the fulcrum of Andy Scott’s burgeoning side. An understanding developed between the pair, permitting the one-time Jamaican international licence to roam and record a remarkable career-high tally of nine goals.

He reminisces with proud smile. “I’ve got so much love for Kev – what a great guy. He’s a model professional and made the game easy for you because you know he is a typical 7.5 or 8/10 player every week. You know what you are going to get. You give him the ball, you know you are going to get it back, you know he’s going to track his runner, you know he’s going to put his foot or head in. That goes a long way.

“He’s a player that every manager wants in their team because you can trust him. It was the same when I was playing next to him. He was holding, which allowed me to get forward a lot more and I knew I could get forward because I could trust him to hold the fort; that’s why I managed to score a few goals that season. I was able to break into the box and get further forward and a lot of that goes down to him.

“I’ve been promoted four times and one similarity they all have is that the dressing rooms are amazing – that was no different to any of the others. It was a bunch of really down-to-earth boys – no primadonnas – who worked their socks off for the badge and for each other. We won the league and didn’t have one player in the Team of the Year and I think that was just down to the fact that teams hated playing against us to refused to put any of us in the team! There was a bit of bitterness but we were really good that year and the boys were brilliant.

“I remember the game against Bournemouth away – that was a crazy game. They were a good side and the way we played as a team and personally I felt on that day that I was steaming around everywhere. It was one of those performances that typified us as a side, that never-say-die attitude. No one would’ve given us a chance after going down to 10 men – we defied all the odds that season.”

As the majority of the squad will no doubt concur across the course of the season, despite a magnificent season, the coach journey back to TW8 after sealing the title at Darlington is a blur – at the very best. Equally, the final day win over Luton is quite the opposite. Marcus is no different.

“That was a really special day,” he continues. “I think the fact that we already had the league sewn up and we were at home meant there was a real party atmosphere – it was electric. I remember lifting the trophy, I remember Ben Hamer having a stupid wig on, the characters and there was a real good feeling about the club.

“I remember we played OK, but I remember Adam Newton’s goal and I couldn’t have been happier for him – he was our leader. He set the standard in the dressing room and was a man that liked everybody to keep their standard high – it was just fitting that he scored that day. I remember him pulling his top off and everyone chasing after him. There is no better than celebrating a title win at home and those days can go down in a damp whimper if you don’t win, so to get the win as well was special.”

One of only a handful of the squad to remain in west London for more than a year post-title win, Marcus remained an important member of the squad as the club entered the transition that set them on the path to promotion to the Championship, under Andy Scott’s successor Uwe Rosler. Not only had his career had been resurrected by the club, it had broken new ground and in 2011, he was given the chance to make his international debut, representing Jamaica against Honduras.

“That was an experience, which the best way to put it!” he laughs. “I’ve got some funny stories about that one, but it was something that I was really proud of, my family were equally proud and it was a great moment that was a reward for one, the season we were having at the time and two, I was playing well at the time and I put myself on the map. Rosler didn’t really want me to go and wasn’t too happy because I missed a couple of league games, but it was something I couldn’t turn down.

“When I got there, it wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be in a sense of organisation and bits and bobs like that, but it is what it is and it is something special personally. The game was completely different to any I’ve ever played it but it is something I will remember for the rest of my life.”

After helping the Bees to two ninth place League One finishes in three seasons, Rosler called time on Bean’s spell in west London in the summer of 2012. With more than 150 appearances, 15 goals, one League Two winners medal and an international cap to his name, his journey came to a halt.

“I was gutted. I didn’t want to leave but I respected Rosler’s decision and his ideas to take the team forward. I was really gutted to be leaving but the club has kicked on since then which is the great thing. That’s football and you just have to get on with it, really. At times we flirted with the play-offs and missed out on a couple of occasions and I would’ve loved to have got a promotion out of that league with Brentford, which would’ve been even more special but the boys got the job done a few years later.”

It wasn’t too long before there was a reunion. Alan Judge’s penalty had secured promotion against Preston on 18 April 2014 and there was little to play for the in the three games that remained, with eventual champions Wolves leading the charge by six points. Colchester – whom Bean subsequently joined – posed little threat to Brentford’s bid to hit a high note in the final away game of the season as they hovered dangerously above the drop zone.

The threat was minimal, on paper, at least, yet the game didn’t follow the script. This was ‘King’ Kevin O’Connor’s 499th appearance for the club – they had to win, didn’t they? Bean struck first after 29 minutes, before his team-mates added a second, and then a third before the break. Stuart Dallas thundered in to reduce the deficit on the stroke of half-time, but when Brian Wilson added his second with 25 minutes to play, the Bees were left chasing shadows, though the heavy defeat failed to dampen the spirits of the jolly away support.

“That was crazy because we were flirting with relegation for the whole season and I think by winning that game we stayed up. When you win promotion early, I think you take your foot off the pedal and that day we were all fired up knowing that if we won we’d survive. I remember scoring that goal and I didn’t celebrate out of respect to the club but that was a bit of a crazy game because Brentford had such a strong squad at the time, good players and we didn’t expect to be winning that game!”

Thankfully, that could prove to be the final meeting between Bean and the Bees in league football, though the anchor man is far from done in the professional game. He achieved a fourth career promotion last season with Wycombe and continues to offer an experienced option for boss Gareth Ainsworth, who was once a team-mate in the QPR days of the early 2000s.

And though a clear gulf now exists between the Bees and their former League Two rivals, Bean says he can draw clear parallels between the two clubs to this day.

“It’s a great family club run the by the fans and you get that sense of camaraderie, everyone is friendly and the gaffer has built that because from what I hear, the dressing room wasn’t like that before. He came in and he’s really signed players based on their social skills and it shines through in the team. After getting promoted last season, I think this is a big season for us to stabilise, stay in the league and then kick on from there. We’ve probably got one of the smallest budgets and everyone knows that usually success comes down to how much you pay people – whether you like it or not, that’s just the way it is.

“We’ll punch above our weight again as we have done before. There have been so many Bees here it’s like a retirement home for ex-Bees with the likes of me, Sam Saunders, Paul Hayes, Sam Wood, but it is good when you see old faces come back around and you play with them again. We always talk about the old days.

“As clubs I think they are very similar. Wycombe is obviously on a smaller scale but they are very similar and I think that’s why, like Brentford, the young boys always seem to do well because there isn’t that crazy pressure or people reminiscing about the old days and expecting crazy performances and winning this and that – there’s realism there. The players that come in play with freedom and without pressure so they are both really good clubs for developing young players. Over the years I think Brentford have done it well and I think Wycombe have really helped people’s careers too.

Earlier this month, Bean celebrated making his 500th professional appearance in the Chairboys’ 1-0 Checkatrade Trophy win at Northampton – a career milestone he might never have thought possible in the past.

“I’ve said this to a few people, I only dreamed of making one appearance,” the ever-gracious 34-year-old says. “To step on that pitch and to make 500, I feel truly blessed. I do something I love and I know how lucky I am so just to make the 500 is another number but it’s just a pleasure to do what I do and to do it for 16-odd years, it’s great.”

Marcus Bean’s move to Brentford proved to be his making, allowing him to overturn a period of turmoil to develop into the experienced figure he continues to cut on the pitch for Wycombe. Not bad for a former QPR player, eh?

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https://danlongmedia.com/2018/11/07/sky-sports-november-2018/#respondWed, 07 Nov 2018 16:56:52 +0000http://danlongmedia.com/?p=1062Read More Sky Sports | November 2018]]>All of the Sky Sports articles written by Dan Long in November 2018…

In similar circumstances to recent History Boys interviewee Marcus Bean, when Marvin Williams joined Brentford in the summer of 2008, he was looking to get his career back on track.

On the books of Millwall from the age of nine, he made his Lions debut aged 18 in bizarre circumstances. Convinced a lack of youth team appearances would spell the end of his time in south London, the end of Steve Claridge’s farcical 36-day stay at the helm was the stroke of fortune his career required.

“Colin Lee [Claridge’s assistant] took over and it just so happened that he watched me in a reserve game, liked what he saw and honestly within two weeks of him taking the first team job, I was in his squad. I remember travelling to Mansfield and I didn’t make the bench, but the following week away at Coventry I was making my debut. Millwall pretty much became my club due to the amount of years I spent there and then to make my debut was crazy because of how close I’d come to moving elsewhere. It was a huge turnaround.

“I’ll never forget it because the assistant manager Dave Tuttle said to me at training, “You’re coming with me, we are going to do some running.” I didn’t really see eye-to-eye with him at the time and I was thinking that he was making me run to try to get me out of the club! He asked me if I knew why I was running and then he told me that I was in the squad for Saturday against Coventry so we just want you to get fit. That’s the only time I’ve ever been happy to do running!”

It wasn’t just a one-off. Marvin became an important member of the Lions squad in the 2005/06 season – often playing alongside former Bees striker Ben May – as they were relegated to League One and more of the same followed the next season, though this time – fortunately – without a second successive relegation. But his willingness to seek change saw him swap the hustle-and-bustle of the capital for country life with Yeovil, then managed by Russell Slade.

“I just wanted change,” he says. “I’m very independent and once I’ve made a decision I’ll stick to it. I’d been at the club for so many years and it was the same training ground, the same faces, the same routines. On top of that, I wanted to play as a centre-forward. I’d just done a season in the Championship as a centre-forward, did really well and could’ve left but I wasn’t going to because Millwall was the club I wanted to be at. Willie Donachie came in to stabilise the club and did a great job, but he just said that I was fourth or fifth in line as a centre-forward.

“Yeovil made a bid and said that they saw me as a forward so I said that I just wanted to have a change. Looking back now I don’t regret it because it taught me in football that the grass isn’t always greener in one respect, though it ended up being a bit of a nightmare with the injury I sustained.”

Though an Achilles injury would prevent Marvin playing into his 30s, ankle woes plagued his early career and a reconstruction limited him to just 23 league appearances for the Glovers, 15 of which came from the bench. Couple that with attempting to settle into a slow-paced life, alien for a London native, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.

When Brentford came knocking in the summer of 2008, naturally, he approached the potential move with scepticism.

“I’d gone from the Championship to League One and now I was going down another league and I wondered if my career was spiralling. I didn’t just want to go somewhere for the sake of it; yes, I’d be back in London but it had to be right for my career. I remember having a coffee with Andy Scott in Beckenham and we got on really well. He spoke highly of me and sold me the vision of the club. The thing for me was that I would be a big part of his plans and what he said to me at that time was what we achieved come the end of the season.

“Andy brought a lot of new faces in and as is the case when you are signing a new set of players, it could either go one way or the other; either you are really successful or it was going to be bitty and stop-start with people moving on. You could sense from day one in pre-season that everyone got on and there were no clicks.

“It was a tough pre-season, I always remember the running side of it with Andy Scott was always tough but the lads would get through it together. I think that was what was most important about the running because it was more about togetherness and getting lads through the running, dragging the ones who were struggling along with you. That helped and one we got through pre-season, you could sense that it could be a special season.

“Alan Bennett and Kev O’Connor were just both top, top guys who you could have a conversation with; very honest people, which is what I respect in people. They created that environment of being there to do things properly and that’s the best thing. Those two, as far as professionals go, they were the model pros to look at and learn. Andy Scott used to do a lot of passing sessions and organised sessions and it was always just about doing it right. If no one was looking, it didn’t matter, you do things properly.”

A week after his debut in the season opener against Bury, Marvin gave fans a glimpse of his ability when he provided assists for Charlie MacDonald and Nathan Elder in a 4-0 demolition of Grimsby. His desire to play as a striker was still yet to be fulfilled, but over the course of the season he appeared 37 times in all competitions, scoring twice. He never bettered that during any further employment in the Football League, yet he remembers his time with mixed emotions.

“I was still getting my head around playing as a wide guy, playing it how I wanted to play it and really being consistent. At the beginning of the season I was enjoying it and the confidence was sky-high through pre-season and then there was times as well where my confidence was low, I wasn’t performing how I wanted to perform and there were things going on within the club where I had a few disagreements with management, which wasn’t always the best thing for myself. It was just up and down really. Towards the end of the year it brightened up and we just had one common goal really which was to get the league title. From a player’s point of view I know I didn’t hit the heights that I knew I could’ve done for whatever reason, but the biggest thing that came out of that year – apart from the league – was what I learned as a player and about relationships.”

Though he stays tight-lipped regarding the details, Marvin’s recollection of the final day of the season is in stark contrast to the bulk of the squad.

“If I was to tell you all about that day, it wouldn’t be much good that would come out of my mouth. If there was a lowest point in my career, it would be that. I hold my hands up and say it wasn’t my strongest season and I remember expecting to be in the squad, but I didn’t get picked. I knew my time at the club was done after that. I’ve got a lot of friends that I still talk to from that group so I was very happy for those lads and what they achieved but it was a great day and a great occasion for the club and the fans but from a personal point of view it was one of the lowest points.

A mutual agreement was made to place Marvin on the transfer list in the weeks that followed, but in spite of this, he remained in west London into the 2009/10 season and even made a six-minute cameo in the 1-0 League Cup defeat at home to Bristol City.

“During pre-season we mutually agreed that I could leave,” he says. “One evening, I got a phonecall from Millsy [former Bees CEO Andrew Mills], who said he’d spoken to Andy Scott and asked if we could mutually agree a pay-out. While negotiating, Colin Lee – who was now Director of Football at Torquay – asked if I wanted to come down on a six-month contract. Once the pay-out was agreed, I signed for them but made sure I made a phonecall to Andy and said, despite anything that ever happened, thank you for giving me the league and making me a part of it.”

Unbeknownst to Marvin, though, those final seconds he spent in the red and white stripes, were seconds that altered the course of his career. Just four appearances later, in December 2009, he was released by the Gulls, and having played for two Football League clubs in the same season, he had now reached the maximum allowance under league regulations. His subsequent options were limited, yet his willingness to adapt this time played to his advantage, allowing him to sample Swedish life, playing for third tier side Ostersunds.

“The guy who was looking after me he should’ve been aware of it but as a young 20-odd year-old kid, I thought it made no difference and I thought I’d get special dispensation having only played six minutes for Brentford that season. But I was told that was the ruling and the only thing I could do at the time was to play conference football, which I didn’t want to do as I felt I was above that level.

“I trained with the club on their pre-season tour of Scotland and I thought ‘Why not?’. They were very good to me and looked after me, gave me a house, gave me a car, flew my family back and forth and paid for the flights. My family moved over there for a few months and I definitely improved in terms of learning a different side to the game; it was a lot slower, more technical and at the time there weren’t many teams playing 4-3-3. It got to a stage where my wife got a bit homesick with the little one and they went home and there were some sniffs from Barnet at the time. It kept me ticking over for a few months and there was never going to be a long-term option for me.”

Barnet, however, failed to firm up their interest with an offer and in September 2010, aged 23, Marvin entered a self-imposed hiatus from the game, following a forgettable two-week spell at Stevenage. He had grown understandably disillusioned and enrolled on a personal training course in order to explore an alternative avenue. In February 2011 he gravitated back to football, merely to return to basics and simply take enjoyment from the game in which he’d made his name.

“I can 100 per cent confirm that non-league was the most enjoyable time because there was a lot less politics. I lost the love of the game playing league football because I probably never really had a relationship with any manager that I really clicked with. That probably sounds like it was me! I had a break for a long time I got a call from a friend who asked if I wanted to play at Hemel Hempstead and the plan was just to go and enjoy it with a little bit of cash in hand each week.

“After a while a few clubs were showing some interest at that level and then I ended up at Salisbury who had one of the best managers I’ve ever played under in Darrell Clarke who is now Bristol Rovers manager – I loved playing under him. I had a short spell at Eastleigh and Sutton, for the last six or seven years, is where I’ve been. It was local to home and Paul Doswell is someone that I’ve got a really, really good relationship with now; he’s a really honest man and I loved playing under him as well.”

Marvin’s non-league days were undoubtedly the most fruitful of his career – he could play through the middle on a regular basis as he’d always longed to and 28 of his 38 career league goals followed. Persistent Achilles trouble tormented him, though, and in 2015 forced him into early retirement, when the next stage of his unique journey kicked into gear.

“The physio told me my Achilles was pretty much done and there wasn’t much more they could do. They could do an operation but it would take me nine months to do just the rehab on it and I just thought, at the level I was playing, it wasn’t a big enough carrot for me to have to go through all of that.

“I was at a stage where I was doing a bit of coaching in the evening with some grassroots teams and I thought I could keep playing with the injury and by 35 not be able to run around and play with my kids, or I can say I got to play in the Championship, League One, League Two, won leagues, played in FA Cups, played in front of thousands. If someone offered me that when I was 10 years-old I would’ve snapped their hand off. I realised that I could keep forcing it or just say enough is enough.”

Having taken on some grassroots coaching responsibilities towards the end of his playing career, Marvin was presented with the rare chance to establish an academy setup at Sutton in late 2014. Fast forward to the present day and the department continues to thrive; at 31-years-old, he is running a successful full-time programme with the National League side and finally comfortably settled.

Developing players – he admits – brings more fulfilment than his playing career ever could and the methods of a certain Mr Scott still inspire his coaching philosophy to this day.

“I can probably say I enjoy my job more than I did playing and that’s me being really honest,” he cathartically admits. “I loved my time at Salisbury and loved my time at Sutton but in comparison to league football, I definitely enjoy this job more than playing in the league.

“I always say to my younger boys now at Sutton, I will never forget the amount of work he [Andy Scott] put in and I will always take that with me. The amount of work he put in on the training pitch in terms of how thorough he was. We used to do pattern of play and I always remember we would do it day after day and wherever the ball was, you had to know where you needed to be as a player.

“It is tough at the time because especially as a young player, you are thinking about why you are doing it, but you are not really understanding the outcomes and the repetition that comes onto the pitch until later on in life. Like me, where I’m luckily now coaching, you then understand the thought process behind it. We wouldn’t have won the league that year if it wasn’t for that level of coaching because that’s what we had against any team that year, we just beat teams, had a philosophy, stuck to it and we knew exactly what our jobs were individually and collectively. We just blew teams away at times because we were that good at doing the same things consistently.

“We’ve got five teams here at Sutton, ranging from U18 to U21 and my job is to oversee the programme, from coaching to taking matchdays, arranging the logistics of a game as well as organising fixtures and recruitment. We’re a programme – effectively funded by the government – that runs alongside an education programme so the boys that come in also have to do a full-time course. We are one of many clubs that do it, but we do it very well and are one of the best in the country at doing it.

“People always ask me if I miss football but because of the club I work for, I’m on the training pitch every day, it keeps you around the game, it keeps you young and keeps you fit. In one word no, I don’t miss the game but obviously when you do go and watch your mates play or you do go to bigger games or you watch the first team play, you do miss that matchday feeling.

“I’ve got so much still to learn and I’ve tried to get around to different academies to watch people and see what they do but at the moment, I’ve got a job that keeps me very busy, I’ve got two kids that keep me busy and I’m just enjoying this. When the moment comes it comes but though I’m not actively looking, management is something that I’d love to get into. I’ve probably got the experience now that I wouldn’t have if I was still playing. I like to think I’ve utilised the time well outside the game and I hope that’s geared me towards a new pathway now for the future.”

Though his playing career ended prematurely, it seems we haven’t seen the last of Marvin Williams in professional football.

An untimely ‘curse’ struck the Bees squad in the final months of the 2008/09 season.

Though Andy Scott’s men were coasting at the League Two summit from early February until the conclusion of the campaign, from March, one by one, members of the forward line started to drop like flies.

Charlie MacDonald dislocated his shoulder, Jordan Rhodes fractured a metatarsal and Damian Spencer suffered a sickening blow to his cheekbone. But first there was Nathan Elder.

Picture the scene. It’s 7th March 2009 and an underwhelming crowd of 3,406 have spread themselves thinly around Rotherham United’s temporary home, the Don Valley Stadium, Sheffield. The Bees are top of League Two, four points clear of Wycombe, having lost just twice in 12 games since the turn of the year; the Millers, meanwhile, continue to flirt with the possibility of relegation from the Football League.

Ben Hamer has perhaps been the busier of the two goalkeepers; Marcus Bean has flashed Mark Hudson’s free-kick narrowly over his own bar, while Sam Wood’s stinging drive has been the closest the Bees have come to an opener. With 62 minutes gone, though, there’s an aerial collision between Pablo Mills and Nathan Elder. The Brentford striker is left crumpled in a heap, writhing around in considerable distress, while the defender somehow escapes any punishment.

As it later became clear, this wasn’t a standard clash. Mills’ elbow had caught 23-year-old Elder and inflicted such damage – a double cheekbone fracture, a fractured eye socket, severe trauma to the eyeball and extensive bleeding in and around the eye – that it was unclear when he would re-gain his sight, if at all.

Naturally, it’s a day he’ll never forget.

“It still sticks in my head but when it actually happened, I jumped up to head the ball and I was knocked out when I landed,” he tells BEES.

“When the physio came over and I came to, where I couldn’t see out of my eye, I thought my eyebrow and cheekbone had swollen up. I knew it was serious. The physio held up two fingers with a hand over one eye and asked how many fingers he was holding up. He switched eyes and I couldn’t tell him because it was just black. For him, he could see that my eye was open and he didn’t panic, but his reaction showed that I needed to go to the hospital immediately.

“I questioned it but stood up and went into the dressing room and as we got there, I looked in the mirror. Everyone was telling me to sit down but I told them to get off me for five minutes so that I could find out what was going on; I could see that both my eyes were open but I could only see out of one of them. That was scary and that’s when I started to panic because I immediately thought I’d lost sight in that eye and it was done for.

He continues: “We were such a tight group that when I got in the ambulance, the coach came to the hospital when usually they’d have gone straight home. But Andy Scott made sure they went to make sure I was alright because he’d seen the kind of trauma that had been caused. It might have been hard for the boys to see it because when I got to the hospital I was in shock and it was a bit of a mass panic with people wondering if I was going to be alright. Andy was phenomenal and the boys were first class, though it must’ve unsettled them.”

A NON-LEAGUE TALENT UNEARTHED

It was a career-altering moment in Elder’s career, but had it not been for his own misdemeanour while playing for non-league Billericay years earlier, he might never have carved a career in professional football at all.

“I was playing against Worthing when the Brighton scouts were there, however, before that I’d been suspended by the club for two games because I missed a game as I’d taken my ex-girlfriend away for her birthday and I wasn’t honest with my manager. I saw the chairman in the bar after a game and he said that he hoped the suspension would teach me a lesson, which I thought was completely unnecessary.

The manager told me he’d start me against Worthing and I had it in my head that I was going to run riot, I was going to be the best that I possibly could just to wind the chairman up and show a little bit of attitude, I suppose. I scored a header in the first half and I remember while everyone was chasing me, I was looking for him in the crowd but I couldn’t find him! I lobbed the goalkeeper in the second half and about 15 minutes before that, I saw where the chairman was, so I scored, ran over to that side and just smiled at him – he must’ve wanted to shoot me!

“It turned out that the Brighton scout came and watched me for the following two games after that. We were playing against someone like Ilford away and the manager pulled me over after the game and just said, “You are no longer with us. We’ve had an offer come in from Brighton and if you accept it, it looks like you are turning pro.” I was looking at him very confused because I hadn’t had a clue. Within the week, I drove down to Brighton with someone from Billericay and they sorted everything out for me.”

His £10,000 move from Essex to the south coast was completed on 1 January 2007, but it proved the grass isn’t always greener. With no prior full-time football experience, Elder initially struggled for opportunities in the Seagulls’ first team, scoring just twice in 22 league appearances, in stark contrast to his performances in the reserves, where he excelled.

With age comes wisdom, though, and he now knows why.

“It was my fault,“ he concedes. ‘I trained really well and in the reserve games I was scoring every time but I never knocked on the managers door and asked him why I wasn’t starting. I always thought to myself that I was lucky to be in this position and coming from where I’d come from, I didn’t want to ruffle any feathers.

“As time has gone on I’ve realised that if you don’t show the hunger in order to give the manager a reason to start you, he won’t. I was sitting there too comfortably and thinking that if I got the call, I’d come in and do my best. I suppose there was no pressure on me if I didn’t put pressure on myself but it was only really when I went to Brentford that I learned that. We went on a losing streak at Brighton of about four or five games where neither of the strikers scored and I think at that point, Dean Wilkins was watching me in training but I never actually said to him, “Gaffer, put me in, give me a chance.”

‘I WAS GIVEN A CLEAR EXPECTATION’

Thirteen months after joining Brighton, Elder admits he was ‘relieved’ to join the Bees in a move that netted his former club a cool £25,000 profit. It was a fresh start for both player and club as Andy Scott attempted to re-stabilise the club following Terry Butcher’s departure in late 2007.

Then came the day of his debut, Saturday 2 February 2008, Mansfield away. After 15 minutes he was thought to have suffered the ignominy of scoring an own goal – which was later credited to Stags forward Michael Boulding – but, to cap a bizarre afternoon, Elder tucked home the winner five minutes from time.

He reminisces: “I remember that I was in the wall and the ball hit me but I’m sure that it was on target and I’d have always said that no matter how many years had gone by. At half-time people were saying: “Unlucky, never mind,” and I didn’t understand, but couldn’t believe that had been given as an own-goal!

“After that I knew I had to do something about it and then when I was through on goal, I can’t lie, I was nervous, but I managed to stay calm, take a deep breath and slot the ball home. That was in front of the Brentford fans behind the goal and I just remember them lapping it up. My granddad had passed away close to that time and I had something to dedicate to him, which was nice. That’s not a game I’m going to forget any time soon!

“When Andy Scott brought me in, he gave me a clear expectation of what he wanted. I was adamant that whatever he wanted me to do, I was going to do. Brentford were in the midst of a season where they were just wanting to stay up when I came in and then after that he set the guidelines in terms of what he wanted to achieve the next season. I think originally it was play-offs but to win the title that season was just crazy.”

Elder notched on three further occasions as the Bees finished 14th in the fourth tier and continued to be a key component of the starting 11 the following campaign, as the next target became apparent: promotion to League One.

““My strike partner changed a bit that season – I started off with Alan Connell and then it was Charlie MacDonald, even Marvin Williams played a couple of games up top. The partnership with Charlie Mac was brilliant. He’s slightly older than me and with that his experience was just invaluable and I found myself learning a lot from him – he was just outstanding in training. I still to this day believe that a lot of the success we had originated from him because he was just such a potent goalscorer and for a young lad to watch what he was doing, it was brilliant to try and emulate that.”

The ‘little and large’ partnership with MacDonald had produced 25 goals as March got underway, but in a cruel twist of fate, neither player scored again that season following on from Elder’s catastrophic injury. Just three weeks later, MacDonald dislocated his shoulder in a 1-1 draw with Gillingham meaning the two had appeared alongside one another for the final time.

INJURY FRUSTRATION

But sitting helplessly on the sidelines for the remainder of the season, what emotions did Elder experience, watching the title win unfold?

“It was horrible. When they brought in Jordan Rhodes, it was really good to see the success he was bringing but when you are sitting indoors and you can do literally nothing, that was pretty horrible. There was one point where I came back to training and the manager said I could do anything apart from anything that involved contact. I had my mask sorted and just trained, but at the end of training I stayed out.

“I had a bag of balls on the edge of the area and was just trying to clip it onto the crossbar; I must’ve been out there for about 40 minutes but I couldn’t do it. Where my vision was blurred in my left eye I couldn’t gauge the distances right and this was something that had always previously been easy to do. Everyone had gone in to get food but I refused to come inside until I had hit the crossbar and in the space of those 40 minutes I must’ve hit it maybe once or twice, whereas usually it would have been about 20 times. That was a realisation that it wasn’t going to be as simple as just going back to training, I had a lot of work to do.”

A return did eventually come, though Elder had to settle for a place on the bench on the final day of the title-winning season. Andy Scott opted against rushing the striker back after such a significant facial injury and rapid recovery, however he understands the sense behind his former manager’s decision and still looks back on the day with pride.

“I was devastated because I really wanted to come on!” he laughs. “With the gaffer at the time, he was thinking that if he didn’t need to bring me on then he wasn’t going to because all it would take was me to run into someone, so he was probably nervous. At the time obviously, I really wanted to come on but when you look back on it, you realise he was probably right to make that decision.

“After the game someone put a red afro on my head and I remember walking round with that for ages! Fans were just running up to you, running up to my dad – who was nothing to do with football – asking him for his autograph and he was lapping it up! There is only really a handful of people who will ever experience something like that but if you can do it once on that sort of stage, it is absolutely unreal.

“As a squad we were very tight knit and we had such a laugh. Every training session there was something going on – whether it was Glenn Poole hiding your boots or Karleigh Osborne wearing some terrible gear into training, it was really, really enjoyable and that’s one thing that I will take away from that experience without a doubt. For every team that I played for after that, that’s what I’ve looked for to see if people are actually enjoying themselves or if it is just a job for them. If you are enjoying it, that’s half the job done.”

Though he planned to kick on at Griffin Park after his recovery from injury, it wasn’t to be. An ill-fated spell at Shrewsbury came next, but before long Elder was back playing non-league football. Perhaps his best spell came at Tonbridge Angels, where he scored 65 goals in just three seasons, but having left the Longmead Stadium this summer, he now balances a player-coach role at Isthmian South East Division side Sittingbourne with a career in recruitment in Leadenhall Market in the city.

But nine years after leaving west London, Elder still credits his spell at Brentford as ‘my favourite ever time in football’.

“I look back at it with a lot of delight,” he concludes. “After I had my injury, I went to watch Brentford away to Bournemouth and took my missus and my little boy. The tickets we had were up in the stands and I think it was the first time the fans had seen me with my injury and it was crazy. Walking up the stairs to my seat to a standing ovation, my missus didn’t even know what to do! It was insane and that’s one thing I want to make clear. The fans that day brought a tear to my eye and it was just really appreciated – even at half-time, I went to the toilet and everyone was singing and taking photos.

“The actual tickets that the club gave us were right in the top corner of the away section so we walked across the pitch, climbed over and walked all the way to the top of the stairs. It was amazing and made me feel really good – the fans that day were special.”

]]>https://danlongmedia.com/2018/10/19/history-boys-nathan-elder/feed/07DFC3345-A5E7-7C8C-5C9EBB434BAC5F6Adanlong93Sky Sports | October 2018https://danlongmedia.com/2018/10/13/sky-sports-october-2018/
https://danlongmedia.com/2018/10/13/sky-sports-october-2018/#respondFri, 12 Oct 2018 23:06:30 +0000http://danlongmedia.com/?p=1048Read More Sky Sports | October 2018]]>All the Sky Sports articles written by Dan Long in October 2018…

In all 129 years of Brentford Football Club’s existence, just one man has won the league as both a player and a manager. The name of that man? Andy Scott.

The forward was picked up by Micky Adams for £75k in November 1997 having begun his professional career with Sheffield United five years earlier. With Premier League experience under his belt, the move was an attractive proposition, though the outlook for the Club became bleak as the 1997/98 season advanced.

Shaun Smith scored the winner as Crewe Alexandra edged David Webb’s Bees in the 1997 Division Two Play-Off Final. Just a year later, 50 points from 46 league games spelled a return to Division Three for the first time since 1992.

“When I first arrived the club was in a precarious position in the league,” Scott exclusively explains to BEES. “I scored on my debut at Oldham, but I think everyone knew we didn’t have a side good enough to cope at that level, though we had a few really great players.

“We ended up getting relegated, Ron Noades came in and no one knew what was going to be happening. Fortunately, we brought in a lot of good players, I kept my place and we had a fantastic year.”

Though Noades would go onto become public enemy number one after bringing the club to its knees, he guided the Bees to the Division Three title – the second time they’d achieved the feat in eight seasons – and gave Scott the platform to enjoy one of the most goal-laden spells of his 14-year professional career.

“You set out each season to win the league but only one team can do it,” he continues. “We really believed that we could do it with the coaches and players that we had; it was one of those seasons where you just knew we were going to win it.

“We got to Cambridge at the end of the season and there were fantastic celebrations at the end of it. It was a very memorable year and when you win a championship and it’s a long slog, you realise why you put all the effort in and you want that same feeling again.”

Eight years after leaving, his wish for a repeat experience came true.

But it wasn’t before a cardiologist discovered a heart condition in early 2005 – hypertrophic cardiomyopathy – that brought his time at Leyton Orient – and ultimately his playing career – to an abrupt halt. As luck would have it, a backroom staff reshuffle at Brisbane Road a few months earlier had seen current Bees boss Dean Smith promoted from youth team coach to assistant manager, presenting Andy with an opening from which to seamlessly transition into the next phase of his career.

BACK WITH THE BEES

At the end of the 2006/07 season, his rise up the managerial ladder accelerated when he swapped east London for west. Brentford had just been relegated from League One, finishing bottom of the pile under the disrupted stewardship of Leroy Rosenior, Scott Fitzgerald and later Barry Quin. They needed a new direction and appointed former England skipper Terry Butcher as manager. With five previous managerial roles behind him, Butcher seemed to provide the experience, grit and guile required to restore the Bees to the third-tier, but having not managed in English football since a short spell with Sunderland in 1993, he needed a figure who knew the club and knew how to deliver on such expectations. Given Scott’s situation, there was only one realistic candidate.

“I was contacted by David Heath who was on the board and was my sponsor when I first came to Brentford as a player. David asked me if I’d be interested in coming for an interview so I went to see him and Terry, we had a chat and I let them know how I thought they could improve. Clearly I made an impression and they offered me the job.

“It was a big step for me to leave Orient after everything they’d done for me, but the pull of coming back to Brentford and with Terry being such a well-known figure in English football was one I couldn’t turn down. Unfortunately, for us as a management duo it didn’t work out for one reason or another and by the time December came, we’d been very, very poor and Terry lost his job,” he says.

“Ultimately, I was part of that duo and it was partly my responsibility as well but I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to take charge of the team. That was my chance to put into place something that I thought we needed to change and it turned out very well. We had a dip towards the end, which I thought was only natural as we had an ageing squad, and sometimes the dynamic of the group wasn’t quite there which we found out throughout the year.

“That was a big learning curve for me, seeing how we played and what we were capable of but the difference between our good games and our poor games were marked with differences. We needed consistency, more energy and power and we needed to be stronger down the spine of the team so that really gave me the impetus to go and recruit in the summer.”

Scott expertly steadied the post-Butcher ship and navigated the Bees to a comfortable mid-table spot, before being given the chance to mould a squad of his own. And, in the pre-season of 2008/09, recruit he did. In came the likes of Ben Hamer, Marcus Bean and Alan Bennett, while the spine of the squad remained in place despite a testing financial climate.

“The club was going through some very tough times with finances and we had a mediocre budget for the league at that time, but we did have an opportunity to bring in a lot of new players. There was a big turnaround in numbers at the beginning but we felt that we had a really good group and we made it clear from the outset how we wanted to work.

“We got everyone fit, strong, powerful, organised and the great thing about it was that the characters of those players was phenomenal, they managed themselves. We had people like Kevin O’Connor still there and they basically ran themselves in the dressing room, dictating how they wanted to behave and they looked after each other so that everyone towed the line. It is very rare to get a group that actually do that but when you do then you are usually successful and I was very lucky to have a good group of lads come in.”

The one common denominator members of the squad has noted when revisiting the title-winning campaign is the 1-0 win over Bournemouth at Dean Court on 13 April – Andy is no different.

“In the period leading up to Bournemouth, we drew three or four games and we hadn’t won for a month. We were in the top three and we had some momentum but the wins just weren’t coming. It was a bank holiday weekend and we had an unbelievable following down on the coast and we came off the pitch that day thinking we could do it – the workrate was phenomenal.

“When Darren Powell was sent off, we went 4-3-2 rather than 4-4-1 and Billy Clarke was up front. Him and Charlie worked their socks off, Sam Wood, Kevin O’Connor, Marcus Bean ran miles and miles in midfield and we defended doggedly. We never looked back after that and that’s the one game of my managerial career that still gives me goosebumps.

“We then had a poor result at Dagenham – which seemed to be my bogey ground – and if we’d have won we would have got promoted, but it all turned out well at Darlington because we won 3-1. Looking round at the end, Dave Carter said to me, “We won it” and I said I knew, but he said, “No, we’ve won the league!” It was unbelievable how it all happened in one go.

“The whole week after Darlington the lads didn’t want to have any days off, they just wanted to come into training and be with each other. After the troubles the club had been through and myself with health and everything like that, to be able to look among the group of players and the fans coming onto the pitch at the end of the Luton game, you don’t often get those times as a manager and you have got to relish them. I remember that very fondly and I still speak to the majority of that squad that I had there because that’s the bond you have when you win leagues. You develop a bond between yourselves because you know how hard you had to work and what you had to do to get there.

“To celebrate lifting the trophy in front of our own fans was retribution for me really, taking the job and the club sticking by me.”

ALL GOOD THINGS…

With Scott having signed a five-year deal in the pre-season prior to the title win, the future looked promising for the Bees; the club had returned to the third tier, with a bright young manager at the helm and, at the culmination of the 2009/10 season, they announced that lifelong Bees fan Matthew Benham was to invest £1 million per year until the 2013/14 season. The mood soon started to turn.

Two wins from the first 11 games in 2010/11 conjured an air of pressure, but if the Griffin Park atmosphere was perceived to be toxic at that point, six defeats from the first eight league games at the turn of the year meant Scott’s position soon became untenable. Despite the dramatic disposal of both Hull City and Everton in the League Cup, coupled with reaching the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy final, the screw turned after a 4-1 defeat at Dagenham. On 3 February, he was dismissed.

“I’d made mistakes with recruitment, but I felt that with the effort and what I’d done previously, we weren’t going to go down. It got to the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy final and I felt that I deserved the opportunity to make amends in the summer, but that wasn’t to be. There was a feeling among fans that they wanted to change things and obviously Matthew decided that was the case.

“I was very disappointed that I wasn’t given longer but as a manager, you know you are going to get sacked at some stage and it’s Matthew decision, it’s his money, it’s his club and he wanted to go in a different direction – that was his choice. Yes, I made mistakes but I would’ve loved to lead my team out at Wembley and that’s my biggest regret in football, the fact I wasn’t able to do that. But it shows the relationship I’ve got with Matthew that we left it amicably and he employed me several years later in another role. For me, that shows I did the right thing and acted in the correct manner.”

ONCE A BEE, ALWAYS A BEE

Four years later, having managed Rotherham and Aldershot in the interim, Scott made the conscious decision to explore alternative careers within the game and linked up with Benham’s company Smartodds. Initially scouting for both the Bees and FC Midtjylland, there was ‘a natural progression’ in the role and before long, Scott was heading up the club’s recruitment department on a full-time basis, playing a key role in the permanent transfers of players such as Rico Henry, Florian Jozefzoon and Sergi Canos.

In November 2017, after less than 18 months in the role, Scott was on the move once more as he joined Watford to take up a similar role as UK Football Recruitment Director at Vicarage Road. But severing his ties with Brentford for a third time proved challenging, the 46-year-old reveals.

“The biggest thing for me when I left – and it was a very, very tough decision – was that if it wasn’t for a Premier League side, I wouldn’t have gone – 100 per cent. Working in the division is a great thing for my CV and to be involved in; it was an opportunity I couldn’t afford to turn down and everybody understood that. I spent about 10-11 years at the club in total so it’s a long association and I really want them to do well.

“We’ve set up a UK recruitment department and I’ve learned from the areas in which we did well at Brentford, developing the areas that I wanted to put into place at Watford. My role involves the structure of the academy, looking at how the first team work and all the staffing issues. We are implementing lots of changes to the training ground and I’ve got a lot of responsibility for that, so it’s an all-round football director role alongside a recruitment role. Working at that level with the players, the finances, the hullaballoo around a top-flight match and all the preparation that goes into it, the media and the focus on it is fantastic.

“Having worked in the Premier League, I really feel that the structure Brentford have in place could really cope if they got promoted. The way they’ve gone about things in the last 5-6 years puts them in a good position to survive because everybody knows how they work and that’s really going to hold them in good stead if they get there.

Scott’s burgeoning behind-the-scenes career appears to be going from strength to strength, but does he ever envisage a return to the dugout?

“Absolutely not!” he exclaims. “I had a very good 7-8 years in management and, like players, you get managers who have their best spells at certain clubs because they just fit right and I fitted right at Brentford. To win the league and to speak to fans about games such as the Everton Carling Cup game, that’s great because I’m part of that, I’m partly responsible for those memories.

“But I was in management for a reason and that was to develop players, organise teams and get everyone playing the way I wanted to play. Realistically, where I was going to go after Aldershot was scrambling around at that level, I didn’t want to be a journeyman manager applying for every job. Now I’m forging out a new career where I’m fortunate to be in the position I am in. Again, that’s down to the people at Brentford and Matthew for giving me the opportunity they did.

“The first thing when organising pre-season at Watford was to ring up Brentford and see if they wanted a game! It just goes to show that I’m never too far away and I always enjoy coming back. I loved my time at Brentford and you never know, I might be back one day…”

To paraphrase Scottish poet Robert Burns, even the best-laid plans often go awry. Former Brentford midfielder David Hunt knows that all too well…

When Hunt – most recently seen taking part in our away kit marketing campaign – joined Shrewsbury from Northampton in May 2007, the club – who had missed out on promotion via the League Two play-offs just days earlier – ticked all the boxes; all the signs pointed to promising career progression, albeit hundreds of miles from home.

“My missus was pregnant at the time and wasn’t comfortable moving that far away from home but she supported me,” he recalls in an exclusive interview with BEES.

“It was quite a big decision but it was one that was tempting financially and the fact of the new stadium and what the club was going to try and achieve was great. I signed my deal, went to Shrewsbury, we moved house up there and we realised it was a million miles away. A three-and-a-half-hour drive for any family members to visit and when you have a child you need as much support as possible and it wasn’t there.

“That takes its toll on your family life and the fact that I was always out and about with the football lads either training or socialising meant my missus was often alone, so that had an effect on the relationship. The manager himself who signed me said to me in the second training session of pre-season, “I didn’t realise you could actually play football, I only signed you for your throw-in!” I was like, “Wow, what have I signed up to?” It started to go downhill from there.”

In spite of his off-field doubts, appearances came thick and fast for Hunt, who mustered 29 games and two goals as the Shrews stuttered their way to a below-par 18th place finish in his debut campaign in Shropshire. The club freshened up the backroom staff as a result, including the appointment of a new manager, but a crocked Hunt was deemed surplus to requirements at New Meadow, though a further year on his contract remained.

A blessing in disguise perhaps, but they do say things have to get worse before they get better. In the age of the glitz and glamour of football, it probably couldn’t have got much more so.

“Andy Scott and Brentford showed an interest and at the beginning of the season, we’d agreed a deal,” he continues. “My missus and I looked at houses around the Maidenhead and Windsor area found a house, put an offer in and everything looked great. The stamp duty was going to be covered by the relocation money from signing the contract but then the deal fell through to join Brentford due to financial reasons, largely down to a previous agent.

“It was such a tough decision but we decided to take the house in Maidenhead and I commuted everyday. I was injured in pre-season so I had to be in at 9am; my alarm would be set for 6am and I’d be in my car by 6.05 ready to go up to Shrewsbury every day. It affected me mentally, physically and it was first time ever in my career I didn’t try in training. Anyone that knew me knew that wasn’t me, it just got to me that much.

“I carried on and nothing was happening so I went home one day and said to my missus that I was going to speak to the manager on the Monday and tell him to cancel my contract and not to worry about the money. He wasn’t in until Tuesday but before I even had the chance to speak, he said: “I think now is the right time to have a chat with you and let you know the bad news. As I’m sure you are aware, you’re not involved and we’re going to be terminating your contract, but we are going to compensate you and I wish you well. I’m sure if you had anything to say, you don’t want to say it now. I called up Andy Scott and signed for Brentford two days later.

“Brentford were in the top three in the league at the time, Shrewsbury were fifth from bottom and I told them that I had no clubs interested in me. I took a bit of a risk because I took a big cut in my wage, knowing that if I produced what I knew I could, they’d look after me the next season. I came down and it was the biggest feeling of relief ever.”

A SUCCESSFUL END TO THE SHROPSHIRE NIGHTMARE ENDS

Then 26 and closing in on 200 Football League appearances, in January Hunt was offered a deal until the end of the 2008/09 season and made his Bees bow in a 2-2 draw away at Lincoln within 24 hours of signing his contract. Granted, he knew that a starting berth in midfield would be difficult to claim in a side taking the league by storm and growing in momentum by the week, but when his chance finally came two months later, he took the shirt from injured skipper Kevin O’Connor with a heavy heart.

“I was happy to be on the bench, in a winning culture, happy to be around lads that I knew, like Kev O’Connor, who I’d known since I was 17-18,” he continues. “It was almost ‘Crazy Gang’ style in the dressing room every single day. It was the proper lads banter that I was used to in the youth team at Crystal Palace. We had great fun but the lads were always grafting hard; there was an air of competitiveness with different positions but I loved it.

“But everything happens for a reason, right? Kev got injured and, of all the people to have got injured, that’s the last person – personally – that I’d have wanted that to happen to, but the rest was history.”

Thrown in at the deep end to make his first league start for the club in a top-of-the-table clash with Wycombe in mid-March, a pre-match car accident couldn’t quite detract the midfielder from netting on his full debut. And what a goal it was: a curling free-kick that evaded every member of the opposition defence, before nestling in the right hand corner of the net. Game of the season, perhaps, but also 3-3 draw that gave Andy Scott’s men a vital point towards their final title-winning tally of 85.

“A lot of people don’t actually understand what happened at the Wycombe game where I made my first league start for the club and scored,” he laughs.

“On the way to the game, outside the Griffin Park, a Wycombe fan crashed into me and wrote off my car. I don’t know why, but it put me in a really angry mindset and I think that actually helped for the game. Ironically, the person who crashed into me admitted to my face that it was actually his fault; I went and scored against them and the next thing I know, there’s an insurance letter on my doorstep saying that it was my fault!”

Both the Bees and Wanderers carried their momentum for the remainder of the campaign, finishing in League Two’s top three spots to secure automatic promotion to the third tier and, having experienced the season at two clubs at opposite ends of the spectrum, Hunt says he ‘knew’ promotion was on the cards right from the moment he arrived in TW8.

“To be honest with you, I looked at all the competition that I’d already seen and I knew full well that it was going to happen when we went away to Shrewsbury and won 3-1, when Jordan Rhodes scored a hat-trick,” he recalls with a grin.

“We had all the right elements and players and it was a team that was ticking every single box. Andy Scott kept adding to the squad with people like Billy Clarke and I just knew there was no way in hell this wasn’t going to happen. But the day I knew there was no stopping us was Bournemouth away. I remember saying to Karleigh Osborne, “Don’t worry, we’ll be fine,” and we ended up winning 1-0. I knew full well, that day, there was no stopping us, no chance.

And when the title was secured at Darlington? There were even harder celebrations than the day Andy Scott’s men lifted the trophy after a 2-0 win over relegated Luton at a sun-baked Griffin Park…

“We didn’t celebrate as hard as we did at Darlo when we won the league – Darlo was amazing with all the fans waiting when we got off the coach. The Luton game was different because I had my family there, had my kids on the pitch, all my mates were there, my dad loved it and every pub was rammed. When you’re leaving you can’t even get to your car because the fans are trying to rope you in to get p***ed! It was like a carnival atmosphere on the last day of the season, they were some of the best times of my life.

“I looked at the pictures the other day, saw Dave Carter with my arm around him and you really do appreciate how lucky you were to experience these things. People might say it was only League Two but you can’t experience those kinds of things unless you’ve been there.”

THE REAL CRAZY GANG

The following season, the midfielder remained an important member of the squad and notched three times as the Bees marked their first season back in the division with a ninth-place finish, but in 2010/11, he found himself out of favour, having been used incredibly scarcely, with just five appearances in the first four months of the season. Soon, it was time to move on.

“Crawley boss Steve Evans tried to sign me when he was at Boston and I wasn’t a big fan of his from what I knew but I just wanted to play. I went there [to Crawley] for a month and I wasn’t too sure at first because he was crazy! But then I started to really like it and that really was the Crazy Gang – I’ve never experienced anything like that.

“There were certain conversations going on behind the scenes which my return to Griffin Park hinged on, but days before Andy Scott lost his job, I signed for Crawley, who had just been pulled out of the hat to play Man United in the FA Cup, on a permanent basis. Nicky Forster took over and tried to sign me back but everything was blocked because the deal was done. That was frustrating, but at the same time Crawley were phenomenal in regards to back-to-back promotions, being involved in the changing room and the fact we created history. The expectation level was far lower than that at Brentford, however, the relationships I built there, especially with the blogging as well; it was like playing for my hometown in a sense. And I played at Old Trafford as well, so not too bad!”

A subtle plug for his blog ‘Life of Another League’, there. His online sanctuary; a place in which to bring the trials and tribulations of a professional footballer to the masses. After starting the website more than five years ago, he was perhaps a trailblazer, yet leading a new era into footballers’ communication with fans was never something Hunt planned.

“It’s given me the edge over everyone else,” he says. “But that wasn’t the reason I did it, I did it because it was a sanctuary for me when I was going crazy at Shrewsbury. I watched Run DMC set up a blog with his son that was called ‘Life of a Jet Setter’ and I quite liked the ring of ‘Life of Another League” because people might look at that as another league in football. My brain was in another league, but that’s how they interpreted it, which was fine. I was thinking that if I was a fan, I’d love to see what life is like behind the scenes; how David Beckham travelled to a game or such and such. Alright, I’m not at Man United but I’m at Brentford and I can share it with them. And the response! I was warming up in games and there were fans shouting that they loved the blog and it was amazing! I lost the love of football further down in my career and stopped doing it as much – I’ve got back on it now – but I wish I’d continued it, I really do. That was probably down to Brentford and Crawley days where I was buzzing and after that I probably lost a bit of enthusiasm or maybe even the clubs were restricting me a little bit more saying that I couldn’t do it as much whereas Brentford were saying for me to do as much as I wanted, when I wanted. I think these things are important for the fans, especially when you are playing at the time, if you’ve got nothing good to say, put it in a blog, don’t say it.”

Two years with the Reds came to a conclusion in 2013 when he left following a mutual agreement for his release, and before long, two years at subsequent employers Oxford had flown past. It was then, in February 2015, that his career changed direction for the first time since he turned professional with Crystal Palace all the way back in 2002.

‘I FELT LIKE I WAS GOING BACKWARDS IN TIME’

“I was looking to come out of the professional game and again had an agreement for some compensation from Oxford United. I took a couple of weeks off to refresh my mind because it was still during the season and basically no clubs were interested in me, I mean no one.

“Whether it was Conference, League One, League Two, I said to my agent I’d go and play for peanuts but there was nothing. I took a week off, spoke to my missus and she said to me, why don’t you go and enjoy football and play with a local club like Maidenhead? Nicky Forster got in touch with me at Staines and I trained with them for a day but I didn’t get the vibe that Staines was right and then I got in touch with Drax [Johnson Hippolyte] at Maidenhead and he said to come down for training. I must’ve impressed because he wouldn’t let me get in my car! I said I’d sleep on it but he messaged me later on that night and offered me a pretty good deal. I went to pick up my phone to call him but, by chance, my agent called me telling me that Crawley Town were trying to call me.

“Normally, if I was in my mid-twenties I’d have thought that was amazing but my heart just dropped and I had a really horrible feeling like going backwards in time. The next thing I know Dean Saunders has called me up and I’m just talking to him and he said I was a fans favourite and tomorrow they [Crawley] have got Sheffield United away, you’re going to be starting right-back; I wasn’t too keen on playing right-back anyway. He said he’d sign me on a month-by-month basis and I was not feeling that.

“I told him that I wasn’t going to do it and he went nuts trying to say to me that I’d never get this opportunity again so I hung up on him and then I called Drax, told him that I was signing for him and he said,” Are you stupid?! I’m buzzing, but you are an idiot!” I said that I just wanted to enjoy football so I went and signed for Drax.”

Ruislip-based Wealdstone was where he most recently plied his trade after an ‘interesting’ spell with Margate. But though he says he’s recently ‘got the bug back’, the sport in which he made his name has taken a back seat, for now, as David Hunt the businessman steps out from the shadows.

“I got involved in the [Organo Gold] coffee with Richard Lee and then got involved with crypto-currency, which is amazing. I’m still heavily involved in crypto-currency but also I’m back in the social media game where I’m helping people with their social media brands but also starting to build up my own blogs, vlogs and YouTube channel as well, which I have a passion for. I have ideas for football clubs to help them build their social media brands. Things that I know that fans would like to see, rather than just your generic stuff that is usually filmed, going in depth, giving certain insights that are pretty cool, and it’s great content for the fans to see.

“I have had offers to go back and play but whether I do or not, I’m not too sure. However, with the commitment side of things, it does put me off a little bit because going away in October, November, December on holiday is unheard of with me and being able to do that now is amazing.”

His closing feelings? A immense sense of gratitude, and belonging to a club he spent close to two special years with.

“I feel very, very fortunate,” he concludes. “To have had the chance to be part of a promotion, part of a club, and to be able to be recognised there at such a big club for them to come and be part of the kit launch as a supposed legend, I feel very overwhelmed here! The rapport I’ve got the with fans there, even with people behind the scenes like Peter Gilham and Bob Oteng, they make me feel so welcome and I’m very, very fortunate to have Brentford in my life.”

]]>https://danlongmedia.com/2018/09/20/history-boys-david-hunt/feed/0Hunty Bees Brown Kitdanlong93Brentford Football Club | 2018/19https://danlongmedia.com/2018/09/17/brentford-football-club-2018-19/
https://danlongmedia.com/2018/09/17/brentford-football-club-2018-19/#respondMon, 17 Sep 2018 12:26:36 +0000http://danlongmedia.com/?p=1024Read More Brentford Football Club | 2018/19]]>As well as writing the 2008/09 League Two anniversary feature this season, I’m continuing to write the opposition preview ‘Hot off the Press’ as well as the Away Day guides for the stadiums the Bees didn’t visit last season.

As ever, the links to each will be posted below so feel free to take a look:

Goal of the season in 2007/08 and 14 goals in his debut campaign in west London; on a personal level, Glenn Poole’s first full season in the Football League probably couldn’t have reached headier heights.

Plucked from non-league Grays Athletic in May 2007 as one of Terry Butcher’s primary acquisitions, the fleet-footed winger became a beacon of hope for the Griffin Park faithful as the struggling Bees – who had been relegated as League One’s basement club just months earlier – regained their footing after being coercively pinned to the ropes.

But what memories does ‘Pooley’ hold of his time in TW8? How did his career progress after departing in the summer of 2009, and what is he up to nowadays? Dan Long sat down with the 37-year-old to chat all things Brentford…

A SECOND CRACK AT THE FOOTBALL LEAGUE

Already something of a non-league nomad by 26, it looked as though a move to a professional club might never materialise, despite Poole’s clear ability – including a penchant for a wild, dipping volley. He enjoyed a stellar 2005/06 campaign with Grays and scored the second in the 2-0 FA Trophy win over Woking, before joining League Two Rochdale for a brief loan spell for the final six games the following season. Finally, a chance to make it in the pro game had manifested; Glenn Poole’s name was gaining momentum.

Just 16 days after his last appearance for Dale, Poole was a Brentford player. The aforementioned turmoil at the club, naturally, continued to evoke raw emotion but with former England skipper Butcher installed at the helm – renowned as a player for his brave, never-say-die attitude – a renewed sense of anticipation lingered.

“It all started off a little bit slow because I didn’t have much of a pre-season – I thought I’d ruptured my Achilles – so I didn’t really play too much of a part,” Poole tells BEES. “It took me a while to settle in but once I’d settled in, I was enjoying just being in the pro game because I’d worked so hard to get there – I was just enjoying every minute.”

As the season progressed under Butcher – currently in charge of the Philippines national side – it became quite clear that he wasn’t the man for the job and the reality of the pre-season optimism was alarmingly contrasting, with successive relegations entirely possible at the time of his sacking in December 2007.

‘I WOULD’VE SIGNED A FIVE-YEAR DEAL’

“Working under Terry Butcher was interesting,” Poole tells BEES. “As a man-manager and a bloke he was really good; he signed me which I will always be grateful for but I think he just suffered with the way the game was changing and got stuck in the past a little bit, but as a man, I can’t fault him.

“When Terry left, Andy Scott got the job and he was the one who really brought me to Brentford, actually; he used to come and watch me when I was at Grays, he knew what I could do. Once he got the job, with the confidence he had in me at the time, that made it easier to play and I was enjoying my football at the time. It bore fruit with all the goals I scored and all the performances I put in, in a team that evidently struggled so it was nice to be the shining light of that season.”

His incredibly respectable 14-goal haul wasn’t quite enough to secure a return to League One at the first time of asking as the Bees’ momentum slipped in the final few months. But with a young manager, who was building his own squad for the first time, was there a sense that the wrongs of 2007/08 could be righted in 2008/09? Poole is frank in his response.

“Collectively, I’d probably say no to be honest with you. Personally I didn’t really know what was going to happen with myself as my agent had had contact from various clubs, but I didn’t want to leave. We’d spoken about various things regarding my situation and it was a case of going and playing and seeing what happened with regards to signing a new deal. I would’ve signed a new four or five-year deal at the time, no question.

“I wasn’t sure where I was at, but I spoke to Scotty and he said that he was building a squad to challenge for the league but I wouldn’t say, honestly, without knowing who was coming in or out, that it was a realistic target. During pre-season he had said we were going for promotion but every club I’ve been at has said that. It wasn’t really until we got into the season that we thought, ‘We can probably do this’.

“I thought I played well and scored seven goals in 20 games and then it all changed. Still to this day I don’t really know why but that’s a story for another day. At that time I was on top of my game and it was a great period for me.”

A BITTERSWEET CAMPAIGN

“I can’t watch too much of that particular DVD, particularly after Christmas,” he jokes. Poole was an integral piece of Andy Scott’s side that worked its way into promotion contention with just two defeats in five months, or 24 league fixtures, but before long it was decided that his influence had waned and his presence from the start was no longer necessary.

Ironically it was the development of another former non-league player, in the shape of Sam Wood, that signalled the beginning of the end for Poole. Wood had bided his time following a summer transfer from Bromley and in December, he grabbed his chance with both hands, impressing so much that he was awarded the player of the season award following the title triumph in May.

For Poole, the levels of frustration were unimaginable, yet he retains no ill-feeling towards his successor.

“It was so frustrating because anyone that knows me knows how much I want to play football, it’s never been any different. I thought I was playing well enough to keep playing; I was still contributing with assists and playing well but I think it was the longest stretch I hadn’t scored for, five or six games. I’d lost my granddad at the time but I didn’t want any time off, I was still going in every day, working hard and it was very difficult to see. But I saw it coming in a strange way because as soon as he [Scott] came up to me and said can I have a word, we were playing Luton away, he said I wasn’t starting today and I knew that was the beginning of the end for me. It surprised me at the time, but I could just see it coming.

“Woodsy came in and was absolutely brilliant, I can’t say that he wasn’t, but it was so frustrating at the time because I felt my own performances didn’t justify the way I was treated, not just in that regard, but around the place as well. I was isolated a little bit and I’m not the sort of person who’ll just accept it – I wear my heart on my sleeve. I’ve always admitted that I could’ve perhaps handled things in a different way but that’s just me and I’ve never been any different.”

Perhaps owing to his adoration for the club, Poole continued to graft – ultimately in vain – but he was handed an opportunity to sign off in style with a part in the final few games of the League Two season. And he did just that; albeit from the substitutes bench, he was part of the squad that won the league after the famous 3-1 victory away at Darlington, before providing a trademark assist for Karleigh Osborne to head home the first in a 2-0 win over beleaguered Luton Town on the final day.

“I’m glad because there was a very strong chance I was going to Gillingham on loan and, to be honest, with things the way they were, I was really pushing to go because I didn’t want to be sat kicking my heels,” he admits.

“I was gutted when it didn’t go through in a way but ultimately, what came out of it was being a part of the last five or six games; coming on and actually contributing in those games, being involved. When all the fans were on the pitch on the last day, I was the last one out there because everyone was having photos with me and saying, “Please don’t go!” That will always stay with me. It was a very difficult time for me but at the end of the day, having that at the end of it was superb.

“Honestly, whenever I go to the ground, I do think ‘What if…?” but overall I’d say it was a success personally and collectively as well. I’m proud of what I achieved at Brentford. To still be held in high regard by the club is something that I take great pleasure out of and when I’m asked back to do things at the club, that speaks volumes.

CONTINUING THE ESSEX ADVENTURE

Following on from his premature departure, Poole briefly dropped out of the Football League for his second spell with Grays Athletic before back-to-back six-month spells with AFC Wimbledon and Barnet in the familiar surroundings of the fourth tier. Fortune did not fall in the favour of the midfielder during either, though, and when the whistle sounded on the latter club’s 1-1 draw with Shrewsbury in January 2011, his time in the league came to a close.

But though an extended spell in the professional game was no longer an option, his non-league career motored along nicely, going from strength to strength as the seasons passed; playing exclusively in Essex for the last seven years, turning out for the likes of Billericay Town and Canvey Island, with a third spell at Grays thrown in for good measure. A swift fall from grace, some might say, yet for Poole, it was a savvy plan, executed with the future at the very forefront of his mind.

“It was just the way it went, really,” he says. “I had offers to go to other clubs in the pro game but I thought, at the time, I just wanted to focus on the rest of my life really; I thought that running my coaching school would be more beneficial than chasing a contract for money that, the older you get, will dwindle so you just want to set yourself up for life really. I don’t miss full-time football and I think it was the best thing to do at that particular time. I took the decision to do that and I haven’t regretted it one bit.

“I played my last game in April. I was on the coaching team at Grays but I can count on one hand the number of coaching sessions I took. I’m just focusing on coaching in the schools rather that at a club. It killed me a little bit at Thurrock and at Grays because I went in as a coach but didn’t get to do anything, so I’m just focusing on my football school at the moment. It’s going really well and it’s all about expansion. It’s a full-time job now so it’s all good.”

]]>https://danlongmedia.com/2018/09/06/history-boys-glenn-poole/feed/0Glenn-Poole-at-Brentford_2406421danlong93History Boys: 2008/09 Uncoveredhttps://danlongmedia.com/2018/09/06/history-boys-2008-09-uncovered/
https://danlongmedia.com/2018/09/06/history-boys-2008-09-uncovered/#respondThu, 06 Sep 2018 15:04:08 +0000http://danlongmedia.com/?p=1014Read More History Boys: 2008/09 Uncovered]]>I’ve been lucky enough to have been given the opportunity to write an original feature series for Brentford this season – History Boys: 2008/09 Uncovered.

An idea I’ve been wanting to pursue for the last couple of years, I essentially speak to the squad that won the League Two title in 2008/09, noting their best memories and seeing where their careers have taken them in the 10 years since. These features are then written up and published in the official matchday programme.

Click on the links below to read each of the players’ interviews in full…